The politics of remembering and forgetting: Vietnamese refugees at Singapore’s Hawkins Road Transit Camp

Abstract

This paper examines the genealogy of Vietnamese refugees based at a transit camp in Singapore between 1975 and 1996. Created by UNHCR with permission of the Singapore government, Hawkins Road Camp hosted Vietnamese refugees with confirmed destinations in their transit. The transit camp was found to be heterotopian, oscillating between the state’s economic pragmatism and humanitarianism. Its heterotopian traits can be traced to its varying (in)visibility throughout its operation from physical demolition to eventual cyber-presence. The heterotopian space of the camp is found to be constructed by two epistemes or politics of truth – the first functioning when the transit camp was in operation and the second operating when the camp was decommissioned and demolished. The first episteme created discursive practices which directed measures at reluctant acceptance and discreet (unpublicised) care of refugees. This is evident from the low media presence, obscure camp location and invisibility not being marked on key landuse maps at the time. The second episteme enacts discursive practices which shape the textual and tangible marginalisations and erasures of refugee presence and history. It is matched and resisted by online commemoration of the transit camp by a stakeholder community concerned with the histories of the transit camp. In doing so, we illuminate the omission of humanitarian ideals for discourses focused on extreme resource vulnerability and economic pragmatism by the Singapore state and provide a geographical critique of such refugee governance. We add to the current literature on the politics and landscapes of remembering and forgetting by examining the subject positions of peoples entwined in these power-relations and highlight the need to attend to the shifts in these subject positions. The shift from a transient unwanted population to one that has never existed has propelled physical and textual erasures of refugee presence.